Democrats Are Requesting Fewer Mail Ballots This Midterm but Returning Them Faster, NBC Analysis Finds

Democrats are requesting fewer mail ballots than in previous elections. The ones they do request are coming back faster.

That is the finding of an NBC News Decision Desk analysis, done with the University of Pennsylvania and published today, Oct. 9. It compares mail ballot requests and returns at the same point in the calendar across four states: North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The findings come less than four weeks before Election Day.

What the numbers show

Since 2020, Democrats have voted by mail at far higher rates than Republicans. That habit created predictable patterns in how early election tallies shift as additional votes are counted. NBC analysts Michael Morse and Marc Meredith say a changed pattern would make early-vote totals a poorer gauge of party enthusiasm. It could also change the red and blue "mirages" seen on recent election nights.

The polling points the same direction. An NBC News poll conducted Sept. 11-15 found 23% of registered Democrats plan to vote by mail, down from 34% in mid-September 2024. Another 36% plan to vote early in person, up six points. A further 36% plan to vote in person on Election Day.

Republicans barely moved. In that poll, 16% said they would vote by mail, 26% early in person and 53% on Election Day, all virtually unchanged from 2024. Among independents, 25% said mail, down from 28%.

The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters and carries a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. It was run jointly by Democratic firm Hart Research Associates and Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies.

State by state

In North Carolina, registrants typically apply for a mail ballot in the months before each particular election, so few had requested mail ballots for the midterm before the Postal Service attempted to impose its new rules. Democrats there are both less likely to request and more likely to return mail ballots than in 2022. The decrease in requests is 40% among Democratic registered voters, versus 18% among Republican registered voters and 23% among independent or third-party registrants. Among Democrats who did request mail ballots, 22% had already returned them in 2026, compared with 17% in 2022.

Georgia shows the same pattern. Registrants there do not declare a party, so the analysts used each precinct's 2024 vote as an approximation. Mail ballot requests are down 52% in precincts that overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris, versus 39% in precincts that overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump.

Virginia is different. It allows registrants to sign up for a permanent absentee mailing list, so there has been no drop-off in mail ballot requests compared with the last general election held in the state. But Democrats are still returning ballots faster. In the most Democratic precincts, 69% more ballots were returned at this point than at the comparison point, while the most Republican precincts saw 5% fewer returned ballots.

The Postal Service fight

Trump has long called mail voting rife with fraud. Examinations of voting data show documented voter fraud is rare. After returning to the White House in 2025, he stepped up the push and directed the Postal Service to build a system to screen ballot envelopes against lists of eligible voters.

Months before the first midterm ballots were due to go out, the Postal Service followed a Trump directive to impose new rules on how election officials send ballots to voters. Voting-rights groups, many of them left-leaning, sued. On the evening of Sept. 14, the Supreme Court blocked the rules from taking effect this year.

The rules won't apply to this election, but the fight appears to have left a mark. A September Marist poll found that only 60% of Democrats are confident the Postal Service will deliver mail ballots on time, down from 86% before the 2024 election. Republican confidence is unchanged.

The Postal Service's slowed delivery times had already prompted voting-rights groups and Democrats to push their voters to consider other ways to vote.

Not just a Democratic story

Ohio's numbers complicate any tidy partisan reading. As of Monday, 601,277 Ohioans had requested mail ballots. At the same point before the 2022 midterm, the figure was 812,198. That is a 26% drop. The 2018 figure was 777,683.

The decline hit both parties' territory. Requests fell 24% in the counties containing Ohio's six largest cities and 28% across the rest of the state. The steepest drop was 47% in deep-red Lawrence County. The smallest, 16.7%, came in Democratic Cuyahoga County and in Vinton County, which backed Trump overwhelmingly.

Early in-person voting is moving the other way. In the 56 Ohio counties with easily available data, voters cast 20,030 early in-person ballots on the first day of early voting, Tuesday. That is more than double the 8,647 on the first day four years ago.

Why requests are down is unclear. Ohio reporting says it could be an early sign of lagging turnout, or simply more voters choosing in-person voting, which would continue a years-long trend in the state. Antone White, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said voters there have preferred in-person voting since the height of the Covid pandemic.

Share versus volume

Other numbers point in a different direction, and they measure something different. CNN reported that Democrats made up 67% of Iowans who had requested mail ballots as of Oct. 1, up from 54% at the same point in 2024. It also reported similar trends in Maine, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia.

A bigger Democratic share of requests is not the same as more Democratic requests. Share of requests also does not translate directly into turnout or vote share.

The Associated Press has reported that more than 1 million people in 30 states had already voted as of Oct. 6.

Election-night implications

Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, the Democratic pollster on the NBC survey, said Democrats have a 23-point advantage on the congressional ballot among early voters, while Republicans have a 14-point advantage among Election Day voters. "If a blue wave comes in, it will hit land at different times, and even on different days or weeks," he said.

Those are the practical stakes of the shift. If Democrats move to in-person early voting, early tallies may look different than in recent elections, and it will be harder to gauge which party has more enthusiasm from early voting figures.

NBC's analysts say much depends on when each state lets voters request ballots. In some states, voters may join a permanent list of mail voters or an annual list at the start of each year. If voters could request their ballot long before concerns about the Postal Service became national news, Democrats are still voting by mail but taking steps to get those ballots back to election officials more quickly. If Democrats faced the choice about whether to request a mail ballot only after the Postal Service challenges, ballot requests are more likely to be down from previous election years.

The analysis covers only four states. The remaining weeks of early-vote data will show whether the pattern holds.